Defamation And No Dignity For The Departed

Every now and again you wonder why so many people have been raised to pull the wings off flies. We would all agree that Sadists exist and, just to be clear, a good majority of them have chosen politics as their profession.

Over the past few days my company and I have been accused of organizing illegal activities and to make matters worse my brother, Bill Arno, has been specifically named as the ring leader. Most of you know this is impossible as he passed away three years ago and you’d think this fact would end the story and embarrass those who have decided for their own reasons to drag his name and my company’s name through the mud heap of politics. It didn’t.

As near as I can follow the story, a few weeks ago the San Bernardino County Democratic Party began to investigate complaints that people had been asked to register to vote and their party affiliation was changed to republican without their knowledge or consent. The sleuths at party headquarters were able to determine that the registration program was being run by a company that had in the past sub-contracted work for a sub-contractor that I routinely hire. I’ve never had warm-fuzzies about the guy but I don’t have warm-fuzzies about a lot the people and groups that work in my field.

The SB party must have believed it had a good scandal on its hands and, since politics and those who report on it live by scandal, there must have been a lot of salivating. For reasons I don’t quite yet understand, although I will relate my theory below, the finance chairman of the party, who I shall hereafter refer to simply as “Jackass,” figured there must be a puppet master to pull the strings of the accused. From what he told me, he engaged in three weeks of internet searches and decided that my company’s name had appeared in numerous – and dubious – news stories and, as he admitted, he decided to link us based on that assumption. For good measure, he decided to include Bill’s name specifically as the coordinator of the plot.

A press release was issued by the SB Party that included details of the alleged malfeasance and referenced Bill’s name along with the name of my company. A similar release was put out by the California Democratic Party, although they left our names out. The press release got the attention of the local press and I woke up one morning to an e-mail from Sladed with an attached story by the Riverside Press Enterprise that included the details as laid out by the SB Democratic Party.

I phoned one of the reporters who wrote the story at a cost of $2.99 per minute from being 5,000 miles and nine time zones ahead of Riverside (most would say that is not far enough away from Riverside). I asked her why in the name of Christ my name appeared in her story when she had not talked to me. She explained she tried but didn’t get a hold of me and then decided to run with the story without a confirmation or admission from me. Back in the day when I was a journalist, there were certain standards in place in which no editor would have allowed a reporter to write a story without making a stronger effort to reach the parties involved in the claim, especially when those making the claim are a political party sending out a press release to gain political advantage.

The story in the Riverside paper did not include Bill’s name so at that point I didn’t know too much about the details of the press release. I told the reporter that I was not involved with the project and that her story was erroneous and I berated her for not taking better care of the facts. She quoted me liberally and said she would make the corrections in a follow-up story she was working on. She acted sympathetic, and that is good, although I thought she should have acted embarrassed for being duped by a minor person working for a minor chapter of a political party.

A few hours later I was informed by Ali from the office that another reporter had called and wanted a comment from me on the story and also indicated that the county district attorney was considering charges against my firm. Despite the fact it was after midnight where I was, I called her. She had written a short entry with few details on her blog the night before but I hadn’t yet seen them.

When I called her she began to ask me questions about my involvement. I told her to slow down and to tell me where she was getting her information. This was when I learned about the press release. I asked her to read the part that referred to me and this is when she told me that Bill was named in the release. I was absolutely floored when I heard that and was speechless for a moment, still trying to figure out if I heard her correctly. Obviously I told her it was impossible because Bill had passed away and, without skipping a beat, she asked me if she could quote me on that bit of news. Stunned again, I became quite angry and, I suppose, cynical to her. I chided her for taking the bait without being more inquisitive of the source of the story.

After this bombshell I told her I wouldn’t speak with her anymore unless she gave me the name and contact information of the person who was responsible for putting out the press release. She complied and it turns out the author of the release (Jackass) worked for Bill and I a decade ago and was such a pain in the butt that we decided not to work with him anymore.

Rather than call him, because I had now figured out the revenge factor as a motivation behind the release, I tried to get the chairman of the local party on the phone. An intern there tracked her down and told me she would call me later in the day or the next day. Instead, Jackass called me. I started in on him and asked him if he was aware that Bill had died three years ago. Instead of this calling into question the veracity of his own story he asked me if I had any proof that Bill had died. I am not sure precisely the number of curse words I used, but one could use their imagination. While he was explaining how he arrived at using my company’s name in his press release – the links in his internet searches – he was searching for information on Bill’s death. Since he didn’t find any he accused me of lying and still wanted proof. I used more colorful words for him.

As with the reporter, I asked him why he didn’t call me to confirm what he had written. He told me there was no point as I would just lie to him, as I was lying about Bill. He even began to say negative things about Bill. I knew something about the company that had been hired to do the work and I gave him their name hoping this would end the nightmare, and then I told him I wanted a retraction of his press release and an apology. He refused to do so until he investigated my story, something I pointed out should have been completed before he chose to defame Bill and my company. I then hung up on the bastard (aka Jackass) and wrote a letter to the chairman that explained the press release was maliciously inaccurate and that I wanted it fixed or I would have somebody’s ass.

The next morning I woke up to this delightful headline “Man accused of voter fraud dead, brother says.” I immediately thought of Sue and Cass and Janee reading this and how they would feel to have to deal with this painful experience again. It also wasn’t a happy moment for me.

I waited the entire day for the chairman of the local party to write me back and let me know what she intended to do. When she didn’t, I contacted our lawyer who is very friendly with the chief counsel for the state democratic party, as am I. The dems’ lawyer agreed that the local party had made a mistake in naming me and he would have the state leaders contact them and suggest they offer a retraction. Instead, I got a ranting call from Jackass again in no mood to apologize. He complained to me that the person I had given him who I believed to be under contract for the voter registration drive hadn’t called him back. I told him it shouldn’t matter anymore as the Press Enterprise ran a story in the morning quoting a spokesman for the California Republican Party on the fact they had hired the contractor in question themselves. This wasn’t good enough for Jackass who said he would continue to investigate on his own. Apparently the Press Enterprise was good enough when it ran a story critical of Bill and me, but not when it clears our names.

I told Jackass about my lawyer’s conversation with the state party’s lawyer, but he didn’t seem to care. So I matter-of-factly told him that he had been given enough time to correct his press release and I would be suing him and the local party. However, perhaps out of morbid curiosity, I decided to call the local party chairwomen. I was interested in what she would say and, frankly, I half expected her to apologize herself and fire the Jackass. Instead she asked me about Bill again and said, “I find it unusual that we can’t find a story or an obituary about his death.” I asked her if she was a lunatic and questioned why this was so difficult to believe, why it was germane to the party’s story and pointed out that by then two newspapers had quoted me that Bill had died. I also read her the quote by the republican spokesman since I assumed she had not read the paper that morning. She said she had but didn’t believe what was in the newspaper. Strangely, both she and Jackass believe everything they read on the internet.

So I told her I would be suing them and she pleaded for more time to look into the matter. I told her the time to get it right had come and gone and the damage had been done by the printing of the first story. The main problem for me is that my political opponents love to plant negative stories about me and then string them all together to demonstrate this broad pattern of “illegal” behavior coordinated by me. My opponents will gladly use the first story, but not the second.

At the end of the conversation, I was shaking I was so angry. It felt like I had fallen down the Rabbit-Hole in Alice In Wonderland. Since Jackass had claimed to have done all his research on the internet, I thought I would do my own searches, particularly about Bill. Within two minutes, I had pulled up four mentions of Bill’s death doing a simple Yahoo! search. The first one that came up was an amazing, but heart-wrenching blog post by Bill’s friend Renfield who lives in Japan. He was with Bill when he first collapsed, gave him CPR and was with Sue and others when Bill took his last breath. His post gives great detail on how Bill passed and his last 48 hours while he was in the hospital. While it’s also a beautiful tribute, I guess I put Ren’s account out of my memory so reading it again just sent me over the edge. I balled like a baby and felt every moment of the pain Ren felt and later how Sue felt. I think Ren’s post is worth reading, but I can understand why people wouldn’t want to so I will end this article with the way Ren ended his post three years ago: “His room was overlooking the ocean and when he died the sky was blue and the haze was far, making the mountains float. The sound of the ocean waved through the room as slowly as his breath. His heart beat and his lungs filled with salt air for the last time. And the ocean waves rumbled on.”

Thank you to Ren for being such a good friend to Bill and Sue and also to Big Tony and “The Verduginator” for being there for Sue and holding her through the toughest moments of her life. No two-bit political hack is ever going to take away what Bill meant to all of us nor change the fact that he lived his life with integrity and honor. I chose to use Bill’s full name in this post because I want an account of this story to show up on the search engines and hopefully people will come to learn the truth.